Editorial SEO: Introduction and Best Practices for Editors

In many ways SEO is about knowing all the tricks. It’s why SEO discussion can easily bounce around from keyword analysis to semantic HTML to site performance to inbound linking to whatever new thing was mentioned in yesterday’s SEOmoz blog post.

When introducing SEO concepts to beginners it’s sometimes easy to forget that they don’t need to know all the tricks. Lurching between too many disparate ideas can make the overall message indigestible. It makes the simple things seem complicated and leaves the beginner overwhelmed. So maybe we don’t do that.

Instead of talking about lions and tigers and bears, maybe we should just talk about lions, and really talk about lions, and try to present the ideas in the simplest terms possible. And if we know we’re talking to an audience of physicists, let’s talk about lions in terms that physicists understand and value.

The presentation below is my attempt at exactly that. It’s an introduction to SEO principles as they apply to writers and editors, and it’s focused on only two things: writing SEO-friendly titles and using keywords effectively. There’s no mention of ALT text, linking, file naming, social media, etc.

Why titles and keywords? Because I think these are the core elements of editorial SEO. It’s the stuff closest to the content, closest to the work editors do. And, arguably, it’s where editorial can have the greatest impact.

(Of course it makes sense that a second and possibly third presentation would follow, covering the rest of the concepts that pertain to editorial teams.)